My Decade in Music So Far: Kim Kelly

*This week, Pitchfork shared lists featuring the best albums and tracks of the decade so far. We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share a favorite song and album that didn't make the list, along with a music highlight and their personal Top 10s or 20s. Check back for more installments of My Decade in Music So Far.
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Cloud Rat is one of the most important bands in extreme music right now, and I don’t say that lightly. Their watershed 2013 album Moksha completely floored me. Between the caustic bursts of grind, the dark slashes of doomed heaviness, the adventurous songwriting, those raw personal lyrics, and that shuddering Neil Young cover it’s pretty much perfect. Go listen to it.

NYC’s Yellow Eyes is one of my very favorite American black metal bands, and I was hoping I could squeeze them onto the official list through sheer force of will. I raved about their 2013 full-length Hammer of Night on the main site, but this particular song (taken from the band’s most recent EP, The Desert Mourns) is an exciting glimpse of where they’re heading.

Musical Highlight of the Last Five Years:

There have been so many riffs and songs and albums that have mattered to me and rattled my guts and touched my heart at various points over the past half decade that narrowing them all down into one tiny gleaming sliver seems impossible. So, I won’t. Above all, my most cherished musical memories are most firmly rooted in the live experience, especially festivals. The complete sensory overloads brought on by wandering literal acres chock full of my favorite things—friends, sweet riffs, whiskey—overpowers any quiet night in spent listening to records. It mattered more to feel Thou’s Bryan Funck scream in my face in an intimate setting like Gilead Fest, or to ping-pong between ecstatic hessians while Bolzer commanded the stage at Iceland’s inimitable Eistnaflug, or to see Yellow Eyes command the Acheron's small stage, or get my hair tangled up with my wonderful other half’s when Morbid Angel oozed into yet another crushing groove at Maryland Deathfest. As much fun as it can be to tally up records and make lists, that’s the stuff I remember.

On a side note, one of my favorite musical developments of the past few years has taken place behind pop country’s closely-guarded white picket fence. The number of strong, progressive female voices that have been burning up the charts and providing a hugely welcome alternative to the bro country plague are a breath of fresh air that Nashville sorely needs to wave away the hanging stench of Axe body spray and stale Coors Light. Painted-on jeans and cold beer don’t have much to do with country, but rebellion against the status quo sure as hell does. Hank didn’t quite do it their way, but I get the feeling he’d tip his hat to the likes of Kacey Musgraves, Kira Isabella, and Maddie & Tae.